Monday, May 18, 2009

Jewish Communists Who Murdered Millions Genrikh Yagoda

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the "father of democracy" in Russia. In one of his books, the first volume of "Gulag Archipelago," he wrote about how the communists in Russia, who consisted of only the Jews and a tiny minority of Russian criminals, amoral opportunists, and welfare rabble were able to maintain their grip on all of Russia by keeping the Russian majority, which hated them, too frightened to resist.Solzhenitsyn writes of the period in 1934 and 1935, when the Jewish commissar Genrikh Yagoda headed the Soviet secret police, and Yagoda's black vans went out every night in St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, to round up "class enemies": former members of the aristocracy, former civil servants, former businessmen, former teachers and professors and professional people, any Russian -- any real Russian -- who had graduated from a university. A quarter of the population of the city was arrested and liquidated by Yagoda during this two-year period.And Solzhenitsyn laments that the citizens of St. Petersburg cowered behind their doors when the black vans pulled up at their apartment houses night after night to arrest their neighbors. If only the decent Russians had fought back, Solzhenitsyn says, if only they had ambushed some of these secret police thugs in the hallways of their apartments with knives and pickaxes and hammers, if only they had spiked the tires of the police vans while the thugs were in the apartments dragging out their victims, they could easily have overwhelmed Yagoda's forces and forced an end to the mass arrests. But they didn't fight back, and the arrests and liquidations continued. And so, Solzhenitsyn concludes, because of their cowardice and their selfishness the Russians deserved what the communists did to them. Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda (Russian: Генрих Григорьевич Ягода; born Yenokh (Enoch) Gershonovich Ieguda (Russian: Енох Гершонович Иегуда)[1]; 1891 – March 15, 1938) was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet internal affairs and border guards body, from 1934 to 1936.Yagoda was born in Rybinsk in a Jewish[2] family, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. After the October Revolution of 1917, he rose through the ranks of the Cheka (the NKVD's predecessor), becoming Felix Dzerzhinsky's second deputy in September 1923. After Dzerzhinsky's death in July 1926, Yagoda became deputy chairman under Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. Due to Menzhinsky's serious illness, Yagoda was in effective control of the secret police in the late 1920s. In 1931, Yagoda was demoted to second deputy chairman. On July 10, 1934, two months after Menzhinsky's death, Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda "People's Commissar for Internal Affairs," a position that included oversight of regular as well as secret police.Yagoda was notorious for his love of gambling and womanizing.[3] When eventually arrested, pornographic material including photographs and films was found in his house. [4] He may have been involved with the murder of his superior Menzhinsky, whom he was later accused of poisoning, and Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated in December 1934[citation needed].Yagoda oversaw the interrogation process leading to the first Moscow Show Trial and subsequent execution of former Soviet leaders Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936, an important milestone in Stalin's Great Purge. Yagoda was one of the founders of the GULAG concentration camp system in which more then 2 million Russians have perished. [5] However, on September 16, 1936 he was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who oversaw the height of the purges in 1937-1938. In March 1937, Yagoda was arrested. He was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty One in March 1938. Solzhenitsyn describes Yagoda as trusting in deliverance from Stalin even during the show trial itself:Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.[6] Yagoda was executed by shooting shortly after the trial.Alexander Orlov, another Jew by birth, attributed the following conversation to Yagoda during his last days at the Lubyanka prison before his execution. When asked by his interrogator if he believed in God, Yagoda replied, "From Stalin I deserved nothing but gratitude for my faithful service; from God I deserved the most severe punishment for having violated his commandments thousands of times. Now look where I am and judge for yourself: is there a God, or not..."[